The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for May 21, 2006

                              Texts: Psalm 67/John 5:1-9         

Title: “Rehabilitation”

              The vast majority of work our Lord Jesus accomplished on earth could be categorized as rehabilitation.  To insure we are all on the same page I am using the definition of rehabilitation that the dictionary provides.  Rehabilitation: “to restore to a former capacity, restore to good repute, to reestablish the good name of.”

              Jesus was a rehabilitator, but the methods of rehabilitation scripture attributes to him bear little resemblance to those used by, for instance, the health practitioner today.  Most typical of his methods are those described in our morning’s lesson. He approached a man paralyzed for thirty-eight years, and without so much as a cursory exam, addresses the man, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 

              A word, that’s all it took, and the man’s body was restored.  A word from Jesus and the blind man regained his sight, the leper was cleansed, the demon-possessed was liberated from his tormentor.  A word from Jesus and pain and suffering were sent to flight.

                Physical rehabilitation is a multi-billion dollar industry.  Aided by X-ray, MRI, CAT scans, and other devices at their disposal, scores of medications from which to choose, and all the other fruits of medical science, however, today’s rehabilitation specialist cannot begin to replicate Jesus’ work. These practitioners in the healing arts know that any gains that one of their patients might make are hard won, exacting great demands on them and the patients they hope to serve.

              It is the rare individual who reaches fifty without experiencing some physical or emotional setback requiring professional help.  Most of us have undergone some form of rehabilitation.  My experience is probably typical.

              A little over a year ago I had a hamstring injury.  The hamstring is the muscle that runs down the back of the leg. Though Ben-gay, ice packs and heat offered some relief, day to day, week to week, I saw no improvement in my condition.  I finally turned to a physical therapist.  I did a series of stretching and other exercises under the therapist’s watchful eye, a time intensive, and costly proposition, that slowly yielded results. Nothing comes easy in the rehabilitation process.  Of course many of you know this from personal experience.

              Rehabilitation is more often than not an arduous process, a process measured in barely discernible gains.  The patient and therapist have to struggle and scrape to make, what often seems to be, the barest progress.

              The church is in the rehabilitation business.  It was a task first placed in the hands of Jesus, who was appointed by God to restore a fallen world to health.  After all these centuries, rehabilitation continues to be one of the central tasks to which the church is committed, though the results to which we can point are achieved with little of the drama or finality that attended the works of Jesus.

              Though how churches define their mission objectives many vary from church to church, you can be certain that rehabilitation figures into those objectives one way or another.  I remind you once again of our definition, rehabilitation means to, “restore to a former capacity, restore to good repute, re-establish the good name of.”

              We here at Lakeview, friends, are in the rehabilitation business. That business placed in our hands as a result of one defining reality.  We believe that God’s original intentions for the world, and all of us, were violated when sin entered the world. As a Christian community we accept responsibility for the world as ambassadors for Christ working to restore hope and order to the world.

              Jesus healed the crippled man with rehabilitation in mind.  He restored bodies, but he placed his power in service to an even greater aim.  He sought to rehabilitate the whole person, to demonstrate through his deeds that the person he healed was a child of God created in the image of God.

              The rehabilitation process takes many forms, but none so dramatic and life-altering as baptism.  In the waters of baptism the church affirms the central hope to which we Christians lay claim.  Baptism signals our rebirth as children of God, our cleansing from the grime of sin, and our total restoration to wholeness.

              God has placed extraordinary powers in the hands of the church as channels of divine forgiveness and grace, and it all begins in the waters of baptism. The process of restoration begins in the waters of baptism, God through Christ assuring us that sin’s curse has been removed.  But the rehabilitative work takes other forms as well.

              This church has a strong heritage in Christian education.  Having baptized, we have taken seriously our responsibility to educate the baptized in what that event means against the backdrop of God’s wondrous works here on earth.  We teach the Bible, accepting the challenge to demonstrate how the ancient word speaks to our contemporary circumstances.  Though diminished in scale our offerings for children, youth, and adults continue to be substantial thanks to the efforts of Jean Marie and our Christian education committee.  As we add breadth to our understanding of how God has worked in the lives of his children through history, we are better prepared to see the power of God at work today.

                  Rehabilitation, this recovery of, this restoration of, our wholeness as children of God occurs in baptism and efforts to learn and claim the heritage in which we stand as God’s children. 

This whole issue of rehabilitation, of course, has taken a whole new turn in light of the storm.  Lost, not to be retrieved, at least to date, are the familiar routines that gave meaning to our individual lives, and our corporate life as a faith community.  The months since the storm has seen rehabilitation occur. The stress and strain which was once so incapacitating is becoming more manageable, though still prominent in many, many lives.

                        Rehabilitation is occurring, though certainly not at a pace to instill confidence that the dawn will break any time soon. The dawn has yet to break for many of us, the rubble in which we life too prominent to overlook, yet we continue to look forward. Many of us ask if yesterday’s election will change anything?  What will the city look like six months, one year out? We simply do not know.  However, we are here, a community of faith given resources to be a community of hope for the people who pass up and down this boulevard (avenue).

                      Rehabilitation is occurring, and we have an opportunity to celebrate that as a worshiping community gathered on Sunday morning.  God is still sovereign, a Lord active in our midst.  God still calls us to worship.  But we recognize another call in the midst of our circumstances, a call to solidarity with our neighbors who are rebuilding our neighborhood and our city.

                      To date we have hosted work teams from across the nation.  Some of us have worked side by side with them, we have been privileged to feed some of them, and to house smaller delegations.  Our neighbors in Lakeview, but across the city as well, have profited greatly from the work done under our auspices and those of the Presbyterian Church at large.

                   Your mission and service and church growth committees are challenging us to take on a broader role.  We have resumed our visitations into the neighborhood.  A monthly effort we made before the storm to welcome new homeowners into our community has become an effort to welcome former residents back. To that end we will be hosting on June 10 a second community picnic.  We will canvass the community with an invitation. Please plan to attend.

                     Our church, owing to the generosity of a family in Venice, Florida, has been given another means of outreach into the community.  We will use the van the family donated, outfitted with magnetic signs reading “Lakeview Presbyterian Church,” to carry refreshments, bottled water and sandwiches, to people at work on their homes. Another effort to become acquainted with our neighbors. 

                   The van will be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of our neighborhood in another very practical way.  The church was awarded a grant by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to purchase a cargo trailer.  The van and cargo trailer will be used to transport work teams and tools to job sites.  The mission and service committee will be identifying dates when volunteers from our church will go out to assist our neighbors in the rehabilitation of their homes. This an effort in which we would hope all the more able members of our church might participate.

                   Rehabilitation has taken on a very practical dimension for our church. It has provided us with an opportunity to interact with and exhibit leadership in our community in new ways. Even as we cope with the personal stress occasioned by the storm God has chosen and equipped to use us in new ways. 

                 There are ways in which the gifts of each one of you can be used in our efforts.  We need people who are willing to go into the neighborhood to meet with our neighbors.  We need people to help out with our upcoming picnic.  We need volunteers to go out with us one Saturday a month to clear out houses.  We need people to make sandwiches.  We need everyone to pray for this ministry on a daily basis, and share with family and friends about what this church is up to.  Rehabilitation must not be left to the few.  It is a task in which all of us must be willing to engage.

                    Rehabilitation is all about restoring, bringing back, what was lost.  Rehabilitation, however, does not happen to us, it happens with us.  Our personal rehabilitation, and rehabilitation of our neighborhoods, is something we jointly undertake with God, a task requiring persistence, patience, and courage.

                    Jesus was the great rehabilitator.  Approaching the crippled man he asked, “Do you want to be made well?”  What kind of question was that?  Of course, he wanted to be made well.  Had he known Jesus better, however, the man might have understood the true thrust of the question.  Not merely the body, Christ was prepared to rehabilitate his entire life. 

               “Do you want to be made well?” Those of you who have ever been in physical or other forms of therapy know the demands wellness placed on you. Wellness is not something that happens to us, it is something that happens with us. Likewise, the rehabilitation that Jesus offered, and offers, requires effort.  It requires honest self-appraisal, and a commitment to do what is necessary to foster change.   

               Rehabilitation is the work of the church.  Wellness is our aim. 

              “Do you want to be made well?”  That is the question that God has addressed to this church.  “Do you want to be well?”  If so, our Lord wants to know what we are willing to do to accomplish  that. 

PRAYER

                Heavenly Father, the times are in your hands, but through the gift of free will you have placed in human hands the ability to use or abuse time as we desire.  We freely confess our poverty of imagination in using our time.  You give us many, many options to explore, but we keep on returning to the same diversions, our senses dulled to the wonders of life that exist at our doorstep.  Life is meant to be lived, but we are often too timid to live, preferring the routine and the familiar to ventures that might challenge us.  Lord, you offer many more opportunities that we can hope to enjoy. With your gifts grant us the wisdom to use them wisely. 

                   Lord, we thank you for everything that adds luster to life, libraries, art galleries, museums, zoos, arboretums, and parks.  We thank you for books, music, theater, movies and lectures.  We thank you for all good gifts that challenge the mind and stir the soul.  We thank you for artists and inventors working in every medium, and the promptings of your spirit that keep challenging them to perfect their craft.  We praise for the artists in our midst who share their artistry through the gifts they bring to our church and community. We thank you for all those who have committed great amounts of time and creativity to providing fellowship opportunities in our church.  We are grateful for the friendships that have evolved out of our creative labors as a congregation.

                  O Christ, our Lord, even as we praise you for the fruits of the mind and spirit, we acknowledge the competing impulses within us that undermine your purposes.  We covet what we are not meant to have, and become estranged from those we envy.  We place competition above cooperation while complaining about the stress and strain we are forced to endure.  Burdened by anxiety about things we cannot change, we find no solace in our leisure.  O Christ, forgive our foolish ways.

                    Created in your image, O God, we have chosen the path of our forbears who scorned your counsel fashioning idols they worshiped as gods.  Forgive our idolatry, our devotion to material goods, ignoring opportunities which might elevate the soul.  Rehabilitate us through the inspiration of your spirit, O Christ, that we may reclaim that which we have forfeited in turning from these. Make us a creative force in our city, O Christ, liberally sharing the gifts with which you have endowed us.

                The world is stressed, and we are stressed, the time exerting unprecedented demands on all citizens of the world.  Wars rage, with new atrocities reported that fuel even more rage, inciting the passion to settle scores.  O God, be merciful lest in our foolishness we kill ourselves.

               We cannot see your hand in the events that occupy the daily headlines.  Deliver us from this maddening, senseless spiral of hatred and recrimination.  Grant wisdom to our leaders, particularly our mayor Ray Nagin that they may be open to your spirit’s guidance in the important decisions they are called to make.

Lord, we praise you for the manifold ways you are at work in the life of this faith community.  We praise you for the gift of baptism in which you welcome us into the body of Christ, and the new life that event inaugurates. We praise you for the visionaries who see opportunity in unlikely places.  Even as our church and other churches identify new mission priorities, grant us the grit and determination to convert those priorities into deeds accomplished.

              All praise be to you, O God, for the bountiful fellowship we experience here, praising you for the mentors and teachers who introduced us to the faith, and those who walk at our side as partners in faith.

              O Christ, our reigning king, holy is your name.  May these prayers and special petitions of your people be pleasing in your sight.  This we pray in Jesus’ name.

              O God, by your Spirit tell us what we need to hear, and show us what we ought to do, to obey Jesus Christ our Savior. 

              Do good and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

             Almighty and merciful God, from whom comes all that is good, we praise you for your mercies, for your goodness that has created us, your grace that has sustained us, your discipline that has corrected us, your patience that has borne with us, and your love that has redeemed us.

              Help us to love you, and be thankful for all your gifts by serving you and delighting to do your will, through Jesus Christ our Lord.